This invention relates generally to digitally imaged lenticular products, and more specifically to digitally imaged lenticular products incorporating customized elements.
Digital printing has revolutionized the printing industry in many ways. The introduction of digital press printing has brought specific benefits previously unparalleled in the lithographic printing arena, particularly in the cost and press time efficiencies associated with the production of make-ready samples, offline plate imaging, availability of “want one, print one” low press run viable capabilities, reduction of press operators, increasing sheet per hour production, individual variability without changing output rate, increasing quality of the press proofs, among others.
Particular media have been used with digital printing presses to create superior quality end products. However, digital press printing with lenticular plastic media has been limited, with the field plagued by problems of quality, reliability and lenticular selection problems. Part of the problem resides in the fact because a specific digital press machine will operate at a substantially fixed resolution, printing will occur at that resolution, which may result in scaling or improper screening of the desired images. Some problems associated with current attempts at lenticular digital press output include, among others, banding, contaminating, out of focus, soft images, double picture data, image degradation, ghosting (latent images) and other artifacts or non-clean, crisp graphics.
Specifically, the selection process and incorporation of lenticular lens media into the digital press output process has been problematic. It has heretofore been a challenge to be able to determine a specific lenticular lens media resolution for a specific digital press to produce high quality, reproducible and commercially acceptable output not plagued by the aforementioned output problems. As digital press machine resolutions vary (from model to model) and even from machine to machine to some extent, it is increasingly desirable to be able to determine an optimal lenticular lens media resolution that accounts for the number of frames desired and the specific machine resolution. Further, it has been further identified as a need to be able to have software programming that works with a digital printing press to use the selected lenticular lens media parameters to create master files that, when printed to a lenticular lens media, are properly interlaced and minimize degradation of the individual images (comprising frames) that are printed to the selected lenticular lens media to create a lenticular image.
Moreover, because of the interrelationship among the digital press, lenticular lens media and the imaging files, there is a need for a lenticular lens digital imaging solution that can take individual or layered image frame files, interlace and combine them into a master image file, the parameters of which are set to correspond to a specific lenticular lens media, and from which the master image file can be printed via the digital press to the lenticular lens media. Since a given lenticular lens media will produce differing results on different digital presses, there is also a need to correspond the lenticular lens media to the specific digital press within the context of the digital imaging solution. At the same time there is additional benefit to having the selected lenticular lens be of a standard lens parameter, to further reduce digital lenticular printing costs.
The concept of mass customization has increased the popularity of individually tailored and person to person variation on a wide spectrum of products. Oftentimes products will lend themselves to changes from one person to another, particularly where personal information is presented or specific accounts or license numbers are printed. One of the benefits of digital press printing is the ability to vary the individual data presented, for example pictures, names, alphanumeric identifiers, as well as the backgrounds, styles and colors within a single print run, and to reduce the minimum required run to make a run commercially profitable (low volume or “on-demand” printing). Given the frame by frame changes, depth control and movement possible with lenticular imagery, and their increased use and popularity, there is a continuing need to further develop digital press printing capabilities with respect to interlaced images and printing to lenticular lens media to incorporate such individual data and variable backgrounds, styles and colors into digital press printed lenticular products. Where such capabilities have been explored, there has been found in the marketplace a need to improve the quality of the final digital press printed lenticular products to a commercially acceptable level of quality and repeatability. The technical nature of printing to lenticular lenses and the accuracy and correspondence required with variable data fields to produce quality results makes the specialized decisions of lenticular lens selection, screening of the variable data, layering of background and foreground graphic data and interlacing of the variable data critical to yield lenticular products of this type that can be successfully printed with a digital press. The current state of the art has not been able to successfully produce such products. Therefore, the need exists for a digital press printed lenticular product that incorporates individualized, customized or variable data fields that can be used as or in conjunction with interlaced images and be printed successfully to lenticular lenses.